A Model-Driven Approach to SAP S/4HANA Development

Neugebauer, Jonathan; Hochstrat, Jonas; Schneid, Konrad; Sigge, Daniel; Kuchen, Herbert

Abstract

While Enterprise Resource Planning systems such as SAP S/4HANA play a key role for many companies, they rarely come alone but are connected to other applications via interfaces. Usually, interface development is done for each project individually. However, there can still be many common requirements shared by multiple projects causing repetitive coding and leading to a maintenance nightmare. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to SAP S/4HANA development driven by models from which running code can be generated automatically. Thus, repetitive coding is avoided and development effort reduced. To this end, we discuss different methods of importing externally generated code into SAP S/4HANA. This is contrary to the development style pursued traditionally and required an analysis of how different development objects must be represented to be importable. As a case study, we apply our approach to interface development. However, beyond this use case, we hope to see applications of our approach in various other areas in the future.

Keywords
Model-driven Software Development; Enterprise Resource Planning; SAP S/4HANA; Data Integration